Up In Arms

Chapter 8

When I walked into the kitchen, I found three of my coworkers sitting at the table, peacefully eating salads that I know didn't come from a restaurant. Not only were the salads wildly different, but the skillet was in the drying rack with some of the pieces of Thunderclap's chemistry set. Somebody taught them how to cook chicken and throw together a salad, and I suspected that it was our arms dealer.

Opening the fridge, I sifted through the containers of leftovers and took the one with his name on it – it had the highest percent chance of actually being edible.

"Where's Thanatos?" I asked, spearing a few leaves of lettuce out of the chilled container. I needed to keep tabs on him to make sure that he wasn't going to sell us all out.

"Meeting." Tenpin said with a mouth full of salad. "Crossbow bolts."

Ah. On the way to the construction site that morning he ranted for fifteen minutes about how hard it was to find a supplier for crossbow bolts that fit the specifications he needed.

"Why, do you miss him?" Lockheed asked, a knowing smirk on his dumb face.

I didn't answer his question, simply taking the salad with me as I exited the kitchen. I dropped by the printer in the living room to take a folder out of my mission mailbox and retreated to the serenity of my room.

While we did go out once every two weeks to collect missions the old-fashioned way, most of our missions and payments came in through the dark web and a large network of mostly-unknowing contacts.

There were three main types of missions: general, specific, and group. General missions could be accepted by anyone, but in our base, we had a schedule for who was supposed to go through the pile and sort them according to who had the best skills for completing it. Specific missions were those where we got paged with a notification, and were a top priority as they came in. Group missions were few and far between, their arrival signaled when a few of us are paged simultaneously, and they usually require close teamwork and coordination.

We can reject missions for whatever reason, and those usually faded into obscurity until whoever ordered the hit forgot about it or tried a different group of assassins.

This mission was simple, the target an executive businessman. Like my previous mission, I could either simply stake out an area my target commonly visited, or I could lure him out with bait.

My fork scraped the bottom of the plastic container and I frowned when I realized that I had been eating absentmindedly. The frown remained when came to another realization, that I'd have to start sharing information about myself to Thanatos if I wanted to continue using him as bait for my missions. The more I thought about it, the harder it was for me to find something definitively dangerous about sharing a few personal interests and likes, and that in itself concerned me.

Stupid soul-tie.

"If you could invite one person to dinner, who would it be?"

Shoving the words back into the dark recesses of my mind, I tucked my folder beneath my arm and dumped my dishes in the sink before heading out to see if I could take out the target on my own. These kinds of unprepared stakeouts usually took all day, so I made sure to leave a note in case Thanatos came back before I did.

Taking my motorcycle and sniper rifle, I pulled my helmet on and effortlessly wove into the semi-cluttered traffic of the city, nobody giving me a second glance. To them, I was just another motorcyclist. Just another sniper. Just another killer. Just another woman. Just another day.

"What would constitute a 'perfect' day for you?"

I pulled up behind a random building, killing the engine to I stare down at the gauges and re-collect my thoughts, shoving the questions deep down and locking them away. Only when I was sure that I could completely focus on my mission did I restart the bike and flow back into the traffic of the city. This man was wanted dead, and this time I was going to make sure he stayed that way.

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